Sensorineural Hearing Loss in Non-depressed Essential Tremor Cases and Controls: A Clinical and Audiometric Study

<p><strong>Background</strong>: Patients with essential tremor (ET) have an increased prevalence of hearing loss, and depression is a confounding issue for both conditions. We assessed hearing loss in non‐depressed ET patients and controls using a questionnaire and audiometric tests.</p><p><strong>Methods</strong>: The study included 34 patients with ET and 45 volunteers were included. Both groups were asked if they had hearing loss, and pure tone audiometry, speech recognition threshold, tympanogram, short increment sensitivity index (SISI), tone decay, and otoacoustic emission audiological tests were conducted.</p><p><strong> Results</strong>: Seventeen subjects (50.0%) in the patient group answered &ldquo;yes&rdquo; to the question &ldquo;Do you have hearing loss?&rdquo; compared to one (2.2%) subject in the control group (p&lt;0.001). The tone decay values of the right ear at 4,000 Hz were higher in the patient group. The number of subjects in which the otoacoustic emissions could not be obtained in the right ear was higher in the ET patients (p = 0.005).</p><p><strong>Discussion</strong>: The results support the presence of a cochlear pathology in ET and may indicate that ET and sensorineural hearing loss may be components of a common disease process.</p

Turkish Standardization of Movement Disorders Society Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale and Unified Dyskinesia Rating Scale

Background: Movement Disorders Society Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) and Unified Dyskinesia Rating Scale (UDysRS) were developed as standard tools to rate Parkinson's disease (PD) and drug-induced dyskinesias of PD. As these scales have become widely used, there is a need for translation to non-English languages. Here we present the standardization for the Turkish translations. Methods: The scales were translated into Turkish and then back-translated to English. These back-translations were reviewed by the MDS team. After cognitive pretesting, movement disorder specialists from nine centers tested 352 patients for MDS-UPDRS, and 250 patients for UDysRS. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were used to determine if the factor structures for the reference standards could be confirmed in the Turkish data. The comparative fit indexes (CFIs) for the scales were required to be 0.90 or higher. Exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) were conducted to explore the underlying factor structure without the constraint of a pre-specified factor structure. Results: For both scales, the CFIs were 0.94 or greater as compared to the reference standard factor structures. The factor structures were consistent with that of reference standards, although there were some differences in some areas as compared to the EFA of the reference standard dataset. This may be due to the inclusion of patients with different stages of PD and different cultural properties of raters and patients. Conclusions: These results demonstrate that the Turkish translations of MDS-UPDRS and UDysRS have adequate clinimetric properties. They are established as the official translations and can be reliably used in Turkish speaking populations